


Don't Kiss and Tell

by Sauronix



Series: The Lights of Lestallum [4]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Absent Gladio, Canon Disabled Character, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Gladnis Feelings, Highspecs Porn, Oral Sex, Pining, Post-Chapter 13, Post-breakup, Rebound Sex, Vaginal Sex, World of Ruin, Yes This Is Gladnis in Disguise, one-night stand
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-02
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2019-01-08 00:22:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12243483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sauronix/pseuds/Sauronix
Summary: When the knock comes at Ignis’s door on a Thursday evening, Aranea Highwind is the last person he expects to find on his threshold.“Heard I could crash here,” she says, pushing past him without waiting to be invited inside. She stinks of sweaty leather and blood, so potent that he wrinkles his nose involuntarily. “Where’s your shower?”“Do you always barge into people’s homes like this?” he asks, but he closes the door anyway, too polite and flabbergasted to ask her to leave.A heartbroken Ignis lets Aranea crash at his place, and one thing leads to another. Set between "The Darkest Nights" and "Sunrise Over Insomnia", though you don't have to read either to understand this.





	Don't Kiss and Tell

When the knock comes at Ignis’s door on a Thursday evening, Aranea Highwind is the last person he expects to find on his threshold.  
  
“Heard I could crash here,” she says, pushing past him without waiting to be invited inside. She stinks of sweaty leather and blood, so potent that he wrinkles his nose involuntarily. “Where’s your shower?”  
  
“Do you always barge into people’s homes like this?” he asks, but he closes the door anyway, too polite and flabbergasted to ask her to leave.  
  
“Look, sweetheart, I’m covered in an inch-thick layer of hobgoblin guts,” she says. “I’d stay at Dave’s place, but he’s out of town. Some hunters down at the Tipsy Imp told me you have a couch I can sleep on. You gonna kick a lady out?”  
  
Ignis shakes his head, sighing. Aranea is a force of nature. She won’t take no for an answer; she’ll stay here tonight whether he likes it or not. “No, no, I wouldn’t dream of it. The bathroom is down the hall on the right. The towels are under the sink.”  
  
“You got somewhere I can put my dirty clothes?”  
  
“Just leave them in the bathtub for now.”  
  
“All right.” Two thunks come in quick succession from the shoe rack. She must have taken off her boots. “Thanks.”  
  
He listens as she pads down the hall, then as the bathroom door clicks shut. The walls are thin, and his remaining senses are sharper than ever; faintly, he can hear a slick sound as she peels her clothes off her skin, then a damp slap as she throws them in the bathtub. A minute later, the toilet flushes, and then the pipes squeal as the shower hisses to life. She hums under the spray, her voice sweeter than he could have imagined.  
  
Sighing, he drops into the armchair by the window. He thought he would be alone tonight. Iris is out on a hunt with Dave, near Old Lestallum, and she won’t be back for three days yet. Talcott is rarely home anymore. More often than not, he’s with Monica, training in hand-to-hand combat. He’s only twelve, but he wants to fight, and Ignis can hardly blame him for that. Though the boy is far from ready to face the daemons, there’s no reason he shouldn’t learn how to defend himself.  
  
Sometimes, when his late-night ruminations take a turn for the bitter, he wonders what Gladio would think about that.  
  
Normally, he’d be out there with Dave and Iris, but a sprained ankle has kept Ignis out of commission for the past week and a half. It’s mostly healed by now, but Iris insisted he stay behind and rest up. _There’s always tomorrow_ , she said. _We can handle this nest by ourselves_.  
  
So he planned to spend the evening in quiet reflection, a piping cup of tea in hand. He certainly wasn’t expecting to host one of the most revered daemon-hunters in Lucis, whom he hasn’t seen since they parted ways in Tenebrae five years ago. He doesn’t mind the company, of course. It gets lonely when he’s the only one home. But Aranea is still a stranger to him, even though they’ve fought side by side on more than one occasion. He doesn’t yet know what to say to her besides the usual pleasantries.  
  
Perhaps she won’t want to talk.  
  
That’s just as well with him.  
  
He doesn’t realize the shower has stopped until she pads back into the living room. She must have used his lemongrass soap to wash up; he can smell it on her from fifteen feet away.  
  
“Tried to keep the mess to a minimum,” she says. “Got a bit of blood on the floor, but I think I managed to clean most of it up.”  
  
“Thank you.” He pauses, unsure what else to say. He isn’t accustomed to having a stranger in his space, especially on such short notice. Suddenly, the sweatpants and too-small t-shirt he’s wearing seem gauche. He has to fight down the urge to get up, go to his bedroom, and change into something more formal. “Would you like a cup of tea?”  
  
“Nah. Not really a tea drinker.”  
  
Sticky footsteps cross the hardwood floor. From sound alone, he knows she’s weaving around the dining room table and then the rocking chair, making for the bookshelves, which still house Gladio’s musty cache of paperbacks and Ignis’s tomes of politics and history. The radio is there, too, and an old record player Gladio picked up from a second-hand store, just before it went out of business a year into the Starscourge.  
  
A moment later, the needle rasps on vinyl, and piano jazz tinkles from the speaker. It’s one of three records in their—his—collection. Ignis has never been particularly fond of jazz, and neither was Gladio, but they listened to it on nights the darkness was too much to stand, when they needed a reminder of the world that was.  
  
He hasn’t touched the record player since Gladio left.  
  
“Sure got a lot of books for a guy who can’t read,” Aranea says.  
  
“Most of them aren’t mine.”  
  
“Whose are they, then?”  
  
Ignis offers her a brittle smile. “Gladio’s.”  
  
“Huh.” There’s a whisper of paper on wood; she must have pulled one of the books from its shelf. “He lives here too?”  
  
“No. He moved out nearly a year ago.”  
  
“And he just left all his things behind?”  
  
All his things, and Ignis, too. He swallows, bowing his head. “In a manner of speaking.”  
  
Aranea doesn’t say anything for a few beats. Pages rustle, and then her footsteps pad back across the room, toward him. The couch dips. Her knee knocks against his thigh, bony and hard, and the clean, chemical fragrance of laundry detergent embraces him. He imagines her sitting next to him, cross-legged, a book open in her lap, her damp, silver hair pooling on her shoulders.  
  
“You don’t sound too happy about it,” she says.  
  
He shrugs. Blunt, dispassionate Aranea isn’t the person he would have chosen to tell about his heartache. He can just imagine the kind of relationship advice she’d dole out—more than likely, she’d tell him to annihilate his sorrows with a shot of whiskey or move on with a wholly inappropriate bedmate. Besides, the people he trusts with his innermost thoughts are few and far between. He’s always kept his feelings to himself. Whenever he needed to talk to someone, he turned to Gladio—but now Gladio is gone.  
  
“I’m not accustomed to living alone,” he says.  
  
“Sure.” The pages rustle as she turns them, slowly, like she’s scanning the contents of each. “That why you keep a tank top that smells like him next to your bed?”  
  
A flush scalds his cheeks. “You went through my things?”  
  
She chuckles. “Come on, any good soldier knows to get a lay of the land when they’re in unfamiliar territory. Yeah, I had a look in your room. Wasn’t much to see, besides the shirt.”  
  
“Why would you assume it belongs to Gladio?”  
  
“Let’s see.” There’s a slap on the coffee table—the book, perhaps. “It’s too big to fit you, and it isn’t really your style. Until tonight, I’d never seen you in anything less than a dress shirt, for crying out loud. Then there was the body spray in your bathroom, which you aren’t wearing, and none of the clothes in your closet smell like it.” She pauses. “The dusty box of condoms and the half-used bottle of lube in your drawer kind of sealed the deal.”  
  
His flush deepens, prickling his scalp. He should say something to deter her from this line of thinking, to assure her that his relationship with Gladio is only platonic. But he can’t, of course, because it isn’t. Last night, he stroked himself to completion with his face buried in that shirt, breathing Gladio’s cologne and pretending it was Gladio’s hand on him instead of his own. It’s what he does whenever the pain of Gladio’s absence is more than he can stand.  
  
“Look, I’m not gonna pry,” Aranea says. The couch cushions shift, and her knee leaves him, taking the heat of her skin with it. “Gossip isn’t really my thing. You can fuck whoever you want.”  
  
There’s little he can say to that, so he says nothing.  
  
“You got wine or anything?” she asks.  
  
“Gladio left a few beers in the fridge,” he says, waving a hand in the direction of the kitchen. “I won’t drink them.”  
  
The couch creaks, and he listens as she goes into the kitchen to retrieve a bottle from the fridge. The beer hisses when she pops the cap off, and then her footsteps return. When she sits, her knee nudges him again, and the scent of lemongrass wafts over him. She’s sitting closer than she was before. Instinctively, he folds his arms over his chest.  
  
“You want to talk about it?” she asks.  
  
“About what?”  
  
“You know.” She leans into him with her shoulder. “Gladio.”  
  
“Are you suggesting you want to listen?”  
  
“I don’t have much else to do, so yeah. Doesn’t mean I’ll spare your feelings, though.”  
  
Telling Aranea about his relationship with Gladio would be like baring his throat to a coeurl, and yet there’s something tempting about it, too. He can’t talk to Iris; no matter how much she might sympathize with him, she’ll always be Gladio’s sister. He can’t talk to Talcott; he’s far too young to understand. And Dave has more important things to worry about than an acquaintance’s romantic misfortune.  
  
Aranea, on the other hand, is impartial, and he might go another five years without seeing her again. Enough time for her to forget they ever had this conversation.  
  
He lets out a sigh. “Where should I start?”  
  
“The beginning’s a good place.” The song on the record fades to silence, and then a melancholy plinking introduces the next one. “Why did he leave?”  
  
“We had an argument,” he says.  
  
“Yeah? About what?”  
  
“Whether I should be allowed to fight. He thought my vision loss would endanger me on hunts.”  
  
Aranea snorts. “Can’t fault that logic.”  
  
“I’ve managed well enough, thank you.”  
  
The beer glugs in its bottle, and he hears her swallowing. “So I’ve heard. Dave says you’re a real badass.”  
  
“As I said, I manage.”  
  
She knocks the bottle against his knee, soaking his pant leg with condensation. “Don’t be so damn modest. You took down an iron giant all by yourself last month, right?”  
  
“I suppose Dave told you that as well?”  
  
“He’s my liaison in Cleigne. He tells me everything.”  
  
Ignis shifts on the couch, away from the heat of her body—not because he doesn’t like it, but because he likes it perhaps a little too much. It’s been a long while since anyone has touched him except to place a guiding hand on his back or hastily patch a wound. “You haven’t told me what you’ve been doing with yourself these past five years.”  
  
“Hunting daemons. What else?” There’s a tapping sound as she places the bottle on the coffee table. “I spend most of my nights at havens. I only come back here when I need to resupply or pick up some new assignments.”  
  
“And yet you never dropped by to say hello.”  
  
“No offense, but you’re not high on my priority list. I’m here maybe two weeks total every year.”  
  
He raises an eyebrow in her general direction. “The people of Lestallum could use your help.”  
  
“They already have people like you and Dave,” she says. “But not everyone wants to leave their homes, and there are a lot of villages out there with no one to defend them. They need me more than Lestallum does.” The couch cushions move under him, and he gets the distinct feeling she’s staring at him now. “Anyway, that’s boring, and we were talking about you. So Gladio left. And you just let him go?”  
  
“What was I supposed to do?”  
  
“Gee, I don’t know…fight for him?”  
  
Ignis grits his teeth. Scarcely a day goes by where he doesn’t wish he’d done something different the night Gladio left. “Once Gladio has made up his mind about something, it’s difficult to budge him. I’m afraid stopping a two hundred and fifty pound man from walking out the door is more easily said than done.”  
  
“So you’ve been sitting around moping about it instead?”  
  
“I haven’t been—”  
  
“Ignis, you keep his t-shirt next to your bed.” Aranea places a hand on his knee, and heat shudders down his spine. “So why don’t you do something about it? Call him?”  
  
“I’ve tried. I called him every day for two weeks. He never answered.”  
  
She doesn’t take her hand away. She lets it rest on his knee, a warm weight even through his sweatpants. “And you haven’t thought about dating someone else?”  
  
At that, he has to laugh. “There’s little time for dating in our world.”  
  
“Oh, come on. Everyone needs a little human touch now and then.”  
  
Ignis shakes his head. “I’ve been too busy fighting to think about it.”  
  
“Really?” The couch creaks, and suddenly she’s in his lap, straddling him, her hands on his shoulders to steady herself. Ignis sucks in a gasp. His knuckles brush against the cotton of the oversized shirt she’s wearing, and then his palms find her thighs, and he realizes she isn’t wearing pants. “Too busy fighting to get laid?”  
  
“Aranea, I—”  
  
“Let me guess,” she says, rolling her hips forward, and he grunts at the sudden friction. “You don’t do things like this.”  
  
His voice strained, he answers, “No.”  
  
“More of a relationship guy?”  
  
Perhaps. The three years he spent with Gladio were the closest thing to a relationship he’s ever known. In his late teens, he went on a few dates with women he met on InsomniaMatch, and while some of them led to sexual encounters, they never became anything more. He was too busy for commitment, and without love, without passion—without the kind of hunger he discovered the first time he kissed Gladio—intimacy seemed tedious.  
  
“Hey, I don’t want to move in with you or anything,” Aranea says. Her hands leave his shoulders to card through his hair, her fingernails scratching pleasantly over his scalp. “I just want to blow off some steam. It’d do you some good, too, y’know.”  
  
“Is that what you think?”  
  
“Yeah.” Her weight leans backward on his thighs, and her hands slide down to cup his cheeks. “You seem tense.”  
  
“Well, I do have a strange woman in my lap.”  
  
Aranea’s thumb traces his cheekbone, where his scar begins. “I bailed your asses out of how many tight spots back in the day, and I’m still just a strange woman to you?”  
  
“Strange in—” He swallows, his eye closing, as she grinds down on his groin. “—this regard.”  
  
“It’ll be less strange once we’re finished fucking. Unless you don’t want me.”  
  
But he does, gods help him, and she must know it, too, because she’s sitting right on his erection. No one since Gladio has managed to bring such a strong response out of him. Without sight, attraction is a nebulous thing; smell and taste and touch are the things that arouse him now, and he’s done very little smelling, tasting, or touching with the people closest to him. And with good reason. Iris and Talcott are like his siblings. Prompto is the nearest thing he has to a best friend. Dave reeks perpetually of sour sweat and daemon guts, and Ignis tries to keep him at arm’s length as much as possible.  
  
But he has his moments. Sometimes, when Cindy places a hand on his shoulder in greeting, Ignis feels a quiver of excitement deep inside him—but he can’t go there. Not when Prompto has been pining after her for years.  
  
Clothing rustles—Aranea’s shirt, mostly likely, discarded—and her hands take his, guiding them up her sides. His fingers pass over soft, hot skin and the grooves of her ribs, until his palms come to rest on her breasts. Aranea holds them there, perhaps daring him to push her away. There’s no need, of course, because he won’t. Her flesh is soft in his hands, and he can feel the beads of her nipples through the thin material of her bra. She makes a small sound of appreciation as he brushes the pads of his thumbs over them.  
  
“Not so bad, is it?” she murmurs as she releases his hands.  
  
It isn’t. It’s quite the opposite. His pulse quickening, he slips his fingers into the cups of her bra and pulls them down, trapping them under her breasts. He grabs at them, squeezing, even as she crushes her mouth to his, forcing his head back against the couch. Her lips taste like hops. She’s aggressive, but she’s not quite as demanding as Gladio. She lets him take control of the kiss, burying her hands again in his hair, rocking down on his erection as he bucks up to meet her.  
  
“You’re gorgeous, you know that?” she pants into his ear.  
  
He thumbs her nipples, flushing with heady pleasure when she gasps. “Am I?”  
  
“Yeah. The scar’s a good look for you.” Her fingers hook under the hem of his shirt and tug, forcing him to release her so she can strip him out of the garment. Warm palms run down his bare chest, then up again, resting just under his collarbones. “Shame you keep all this under wraps, though.”  
  
With a hand on the small of her back, he jerks her against him, his mouth meeting the swell of her breast. She laces her fingers over the nape of his neck and clings to him—and just like that, any reservations he may have had are swept away. He’s been waiting all these long, dark months, and for what? For Gladio to come home and admit he was wrong? To tell Ignis he still loves him? To draw Ignis into his arms and give him the pleasure he’s been craving? It won’t happen. Gladio no longer wants him.  
  
But Aranea wants him, even if only for this night.  
  
There’s no harm in letting her have him, nor in taking what she’s offering.  
  
So he teases her nipple with the tip of his tongue, and she surges against him, rising onto her knees, her weight pinning him against the back of the couch. The hand on her spine slips down, over the band of her thong, to cup her rear. The build of her body is unfamiliar. She’s well-muscled, but there’s a layer of fat over it, a soft shell to her steel interior. His fingers dig into her flesh when he squeezes her cheek, pulling a quiet chuckle out of her.  
  
“Lie down,” he says.  
  
Her knuckle catches him under the chin, tilting his head up, and she kisses him hard on the lips. “You think you’re in charge here?”  
  
He smirks. “No less than you are.”  
  
“You sure about that?”  
  
“Aranea,” he murmurs, placating, his thumb stroking her hip, “please.”  
  
Another soft laugh meets his ears, but she climbs off him, folding one leg against his shoulder and draping the other over his knees. He moves up her body, his hand using the muscular curves of her calf and hamstring as a guide, until he reaches her thong. This, he peels down, pulling it off when she lifts her hips to give him access. Then he trails a hand up her inner thigh, following it with his lips, until he reaches the wet heat between her legs.  
  
The smell of her sex is intoxicating. He takes a moment to breathe it in before he tastes it, dipping his tongue into her folds. At his touch, she makes a soft, surprised sound. The muscles in her thigh twitches when he places a hand on it, pushing her legs open further.  
  
With his free thumb, he strokes her clitoris, moving in light, teasing circles over the sensitive bundle of nerve endings. It’s been a long time since he touched a woman like this, but perhaps he hasn’t lost what little skill he possessed. Aranea gasps, her fingers gripping his hair so hard it makes his eye water, holding his head between her legs.  
  
To be fair, he’s not entirely unaffected himself. The sound of her, the taste of her, the sensation of her wetness on his tongue—they all have him absolutely aching with need.  
  
Slowly, he drags his tongue upward to flick at her clitoris. Then he sucks it between his lips, sliding two fingers inside her at the same time.  
  
“ _Fuck_ , Ignis,” she gasps.  
  
He laughs and starts to stroke his fingers over her insides, laving her clitoris with the flat of his tongue. Her hips roll up to meet his mouth, one leg hooking over his back, like she’s trying to pull his face closer. He responds by grazing the tip of his tongue over that sensitive bead, again and again, until he has to anchor her to the couch to stop her from squirming.  
  
It isn’t long before she starts to come. The hand in his hair grips him harder, and the thigh he’s holding against the cushions quivers uncontrollably. She lets go with a choked moan, her hips arching up against him, her body shuddering through her orgasm. Only when she goes still does he release her, sitting back to wipe her fluids off his chin.  
  
“Shall I get a condom?” he murmurs.  
  
“No need.” He hears her shift, and then there’s a crinkle of foil. “I grabbed one from your room when I was in there earlier.”  
  
“Did you?”  
  
“Yeah.” The foil tears, and impatiently, she starts to push his pants down. A hand closes around his shaft, stroking him once with a firm grip. “Figured I should be ready in case something like this happened.”  
  
Ignis has to grab the back of the couch to steady himself, biting back a groan. “And here I thought you were being spontaneous.”  
  
She laughs. “I _was_ being spontaneous. I didn’t know I wanted to fuck you until I saw you.”  
  
She strokes him a few more times, her hand slicked with his precome, before she rolls the condom onto him. By then, he’s more than ready to be inside her, to plunge into the heat he tasted on his tongue. He goes down easily when she pulls him on top of her, between her legs. They’re an ungainly tangle of limbs, and he takes a moment of adjust his position, propping himself up on his elbow above her.  
  
“What are you waiting for?” she asks.  
  
Hands grasping his backside, she urges him forward until he’s nudging at her vulva. He already knows she’s going to open up for him easily, that she’s going to take all of him like he belongs there. His pulse thunders in his ears as he enters her, inch by aching inch, burying himself in her slick heat. When she clenches her muscles around him, he lets out a soft moan.  
  
“Don’t stop,” she pants.  
  
So he doesn’t. He takes her slowly at first, bracing himself with one hand on the back of the couch and the other beside her. His nerves hum with pleasure as his hips take over for his brain, as he reacquaints himself with the sensation of being inside someone. Tacky with sweat, their skin sticks together everywhere their bodies meet. He can’t see her. But he can hear her erratic breaths and feel the fingernails that dig into his biceps. He can still smell his soap on her.  
  
Her legs, locked around his waist, squeeze him so hard he has to fight to pull out—and when he thrusts back in, they force him deeper into her, until his balls are slapping her skin with every motion of his hips.  
  
He picks up the pace gradually, bringing his hand down off the couch to grasp her breast. He alternates between kneading it and grazing his thumb over her nipple, letting her pull him into a hungry kiss. For a few precious minutes, there’s no room for thought; there’s only the heat of her mouth and the slick sounds of their joining. There’s only the white-hot orgasm that rushes up on him.  
  
He wants to hold on longer, but he can’t.  
  
He comes with a ragged cry, thrusting deep into her one last time before he subsides into a few weak pumps, her body wringing every last ounce of pleasure out of him. Trembling, spent, he lays his head on her chest and listens to her heartbeat thundering in his ear.  
  
A phone rings before he has time to come down from the high. Cursing, Aranea pushes him away, her body leaning off the couch to fumble for something on the coffee table.  
  
“Highwind,” she says curtly when she answers. She listens for a moment, then says, “Shit. Okay. Where exactly are you?” There’s another silence before she says, “Gotcha. I can be there in two hours.”  
  
“Who was that?” he asks after she hangs up, sitting back on his haunches.  
  
“Dave,” she says. The couch creaks as she rises from it. “There was a fire at a greenhouse near Old Lestallum. Destroyed a ton of crops. They need all the hunters they can get to fend off the daemons while they’re rebuilding.” There’s a pause, a rustle of fabric, a snap of elastic. She must have slipped back into her underwear. “We can go together, if you want to come. Got room for you on the back of my bike.”  
  
Ignis rises, too, and pulls up his sweatpants. “Certainly. Just give me a moment to put on something more appropriate.”  
  
“You should call Gladio. We could use his muscle.”  
  
Ignis shakes his head. “I don’t know, Aranea. He won’t listen to me.”  
  
She comes up to him and kisses him gently on the lips. “You won’t know until you try. Just call him.” Then she pats his cheek and walks away.  
  
Ignis starts to feel his way to the bedroom. Once he’s inside, he closes the door behind him and takes up his phone from the bedside table. Then he picks up Gladio’s shirt, too, and holds them both for a minute, considering. It’s been ten months since he last spoke to Gladio. Nine months since he last heard Gladio’s voice on a recording, instructing him to leave a message—a message Gladio never returned.  
  
Will Gladio answer if he calls now?  
  
Bringing the shirt to his face, he breathes in Gladio’s scent and aches with longing. He just wants to hear his voice again. Perhaps Aranea was right. Perhaps time has tempered Gladio’s anger. Perhaps now, he’ll realize he made a mistake.  
  
Maybe he’ll come home if Ignis asks it of him.  
  
Before he can doubt himself, he swipes the phone’s screen and says, “Dial Gladio.”  
  
It rings once, twice, thrice, then a fourth time. He’s about to give it up as a lost cause when the line picks up.  
  
“Yeah?” Gladio grunts, and Ignis can’t help his leaping pulse.  
  
“Gladio,” he murmurs, sitting on the edge of the bed, his heart pounding so hard he can feel it in his throat. “Please don’t hang up. This isn’t a personal call…”

**Author's Note:**

> In Sunrise Over Insomnia, Ignis tells Gladio he slept with someone during the six years they were apart. Though Gladio asks who, Ignis says he doesn't kiss and tell. But I never said I wouldn't tell. So I did. This is the answer.
> 
> As usual, if you enjoyed this, kudos and/or comments are much appreciated.
> 
> Also, if you want to chat with an awesome group of FFXV writers and fans, feel free to join Chill XV on Discord! We always welcome new members. Click this link to join: https://discord.gg/DGMJfzJ


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